Knowledge is one of the most important assets of any organization. In the information age, it can hardly be disputed that knowledge is value. It has been speculated that the ability of an enterprise to capture and share knowledge, and its ability to reuse, reinvent and innovate using that knowledge, will become a key determinant and predictor of the enterprise's value in the near future.
Knowledge management (KM) refers to a system for the codification, creation, storage, structuring, dissemination, application and sharing of an organization's knowledge assets. Knowledge management is, in some sense, a system for formally accounting for an organization's intellectual capital. Despite the clear importance of knowledge to any organization, such knowledge management systems have not gained widespread acceptance.
A principal reason why knowledge management is not widely used is that existing knowledge management techniques are not tightly bound with the business processes to which they relate, and thus are often perceived by those who must use them as unwieldy appendages. For example, an attempt to introduce knowledge management into an organization may fail because the knowledge management process is viewed by the people who must carry it out as a non-integrated separate project rather than a systemic change in the way work is performed. Within a business, there may be employee resistance to corporate initiatives. The management commitment for knowledge management may wane—particularly if the champion of knowledge management has left the organization, or if the benefits of knowledge management are not quickly and visibly realized. Similarly, since knowledge management must be carried out by the employees who participate in knowledge-using and knowledge-generating processes, employees may resist the knowledge management activities if the employees are not involved in the planning of the knowledge management system.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for a technique for creating a sustainable knowledge management system that overcomes the drawbacks of the prior art.